God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [254]
Six weeks later they returned, and again there were no problems until market day. On that day, however, 4 July, Edward Burrow, a soldier who had been assisting the excisemen in delivering warrants and distraining goods for non-payment, was chained to the bullring by protesters from 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is this detail that suggests that the hostility was here directed against the excises on meat. The drumming was also heard again, but when the excisemen went to Colonel Sir John Gell, one of whose troopers it was who was chained to the bullring, they got no help in collecting the excise (or, as they put it, upholding Parliament’s ordinance and authority). Gell, asked either to punish the women or to take them into custody, replied instead that ‘he did not use to meddle with women unless they were handsome’.47
This disturbance was clearly more than an uprising of the dispossessed, unable to bear the burdens of the war any longer. The tensions between the excisemen and the local authorities were not uncommon. Neither was the apparent sympathy of local governors, who were perhaps accepting their much-stated obligations to protect their poorer neighbours or entering into an unusual alliance in order to protect their own authority from encroachment.48 At the same time the intertwining of military and civil authority was not necessarily easy, but the ambiguity also meant that soldiers were not necessarily the enemies of the people, or anonymous outsiders. Although the armies depended on the excise for their pay, soldiers were sometimes associated with resistance to its collection, and in 1647 the attitude of a radicalized army to the proposed abolition of the excise was ambiguous.49 In Derby there was at least a four-way tension: between army, excisemen, local civil authority and the local population. Again this may not have been unusual, and in these multi-dimensional local conflicts appeal to authority was common. It was Parliament that should reply, the presence of their representatives should ensure collection and refusal to pay was an affront to Parliament’s authority. As with the fen and forest disturbances, there was order within the disorder – the protest was organized, targeted and employed a symbolism that communicated a specific grievance.
Authority in English villages was exercised personally and its effectiveness rested as much on local reputation as formal warrant. The civil war created new offices, staffed by people who did not have the qualities of a natural governor, or the local reputation and influence to mediate conflicts. Arbitrariness was often a personal quality as much as a formal one – as the clubmen’s petitions had made clear. Here the poor and disaffected could find common cause with their social superiors whose own pre-eminence was challenged by these new offices. Excisemen were denounced in terms of a biblical plague – caterpillars devouring local crops to feed their own insatiable appetites. Behind this hostility lay a brute fact – they were earning a living through the collection of taxes rather than collecting taxes as part of the obligations of a prominent local man.
The proliferating committees of Parliament’s local administration also prompted this kind of hostility. Rancorous conflicts between established local gentlemen and committeemen, or between committees and sub-committees, have been documented in Cheshire, Staffordshire, Kent, Cheshire, Sussex, Somerset and elsewhere. They all resonated more deeply, with a more humble objection to these forms of authority and the burdens they imposed. In fact, in most counties there was no dramatic difference